I read up on it. The judge was a programmer on the side but he programmed in QBasic as a hobby and had been doing so from the 1980s to the mid 2010s if I remember right.
So he was familiar with “one” language but he knew it well enough.
The fight was between Oracle and Google I think and it was narrowed down to ONE block of code.
The lawyers were trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes claiming that Google stole Oracle’s code (or visa versa I don’t remember who).
But the code block look SUSPICIOUSLY simple to the Judge’s eyes.
So he opened up a JAVA book and studied just enough to confirm his suspicions: it was a stupid loop that any high school kid would write that performed a simple input check
(something like “Make sure input is letters A-Z / a-z /0 -9″ but no symbols”) -that kind of thing).
If you know ANY programming language at all, you can certainly decipher a basic loop from another language.
So due to this, news broadcast it as “he learned java in a weekend to understand a case better!” but it wasn’t as dramatic as they make it.
Still, I like it. Computer nerd uses nerd skill to decipher a simple loop in a language he never used before.